What the Rich Used to Look Like

Three great shows in New York City bring to life the styles and personalities of the high-net-worth individuals of long ago.

By
Kevin Conley and Mary Kaye Schilling

Apr 15, 2016

Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection

Palm Beach artist Ralph Wolfe Cowan painted Donald Trump in tennis whites in 1989. The man who has fashioned himself as a voice of the people during the current presidential campaign, was delighted to be portrayed as a sun-kissed gentleman of leisure, controlling yet casual, a celestial sunburst over his shoulder, announcing if not the hand of God then at least a blessing or nod of approval.

It was Cowan's choice to do an oil portrait sketch, and he intentionally left part of the canvas unfinished—a choice that, according to the artist, his subject did not quite get. Every time Cowan visited Mar-a-Lago , where it hangs, Trump would ask when that area was going to be filled in. "It's hard explaining to Donald," Cowan told Confidential.

The rich and famous and those who wear crowns have been art directing their images for centuries, some with more success than others. The elite have always wanted to be seen, and two wonderful shows on view this spring are opulent reminders of just how far back branding your image goes.

The first, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 15, features the portraits of Louise Elizabeth Vigée le Brun (1755-1842), a virtuoso who was painting professionally in her teens, and who became the preferred portraitist of Marie Antoinette and her posse. (Luckily, once the Revolution started, Vigée Le Brun kept her head by slipping out of France in disguise—with her young daughter—remaining free to paint high society in Italy and Russia in the ensuing decades.) A few blocks away, The Frick is dedicating a hefty chunk of wall space to the masterpieces of Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), who focused on the upper tranches of Baroque nobility, English kings, Dutch powerbrokers, and Italian cardinals in all their finery (through June 5).

Mary Kaye Schilling Vigée Le Brun has an insanely fascinating story. Not only was she a court painter when there were almost no professional female artists, she was a savvy marketer who managed to humanize Marie Antoinette to some increasingly cranky subjects. There's an amazing painting, in the third room of the Met show: The Queen is on her knees picking up Vigée Le Brun's paint brushes, which had fallen on the floor. It's such a sweet, casual moment, and the spontaneity captured is similar to what you'd see in a photograph.

Kevin Conley She had a real knack for setting her sitters at ease, and for creating empathy for even the most difficult people.

MKS Like that Russian woman towards the end of the show—the one who kept cancelling her sittings then changing her hair so poor Vigée Le Brun had to start over. Nightmare rich clients are forever.

KC I think she was even avant-garde in her day, revealing more skin than was proper. And I guess one of her self-portraits shocked people because she was smiling—and her teeth were showing! Quelle scandale!

Both painters get points for tackling the big problem of society portraiture: They excelled at subtly flattering the subject while depicting the high fashions of the day. Each could achieve an almost trompe-l'oeil level of detail, which was critical at a time when the richness and complexity of fabrics were status symbols. Van Dyck proved to be a dab hand at painting Genoese embroidery and ecclesiastic silks.

MKS And both had more to work with than photographers and portrait painters today since back then a man's clothing could be as elaborate, or more elaborate, than a woman's.

KC Vigée Le Brun's paintings, with their racy bodices and plush sateens, might as well be fashion shoots.

Madame Grand, by Vigee Le Brun, 1783

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

MKS Vigée Le Brun lucked out in that regard; she lived during sultrier times in France. It's hard to make anyone look sexy in a Dutch neck ruff. One of her subjects—probably a high-placed mistress since they seemed to be the trendsetters (see Madame de Pompadour)—started the whole "windswept shepherdess" trend, which had the court's women masquerading as saucy peasant girls. One minute Marie Antoinette's wearing massive hoops and teetering powdered wigs—all of which looks exhausting, by the way—and a few galleries later she's in sun bonnets and loosely tied white muslin dresses. Marie Antoinette really crusaded for a more natural look and lifestyle. She was the Gwyneth Paltrow of her day. I imagine her blog would have been called Cake.

KC The drawback of looking at Van Dyck's and Vigée Le Brun's society portraiture is that I lack all of the up-to-the-minute information these paintings require. Like the powdered hair. The gray hair that young women are wearing today is a lot more charming than that of the 16th and 17th century. And they all wore it that way. It's the sort of thing that gives Vigée Le Brun's paintings an alien sameness.

MKS The fashion started, as so many things do, with men behaving badly. Venereal disease was rampant in the late 1500s, and one of the side effects was hair loss. Since men had to shave their heads to wear a wig properly, they were also helpful in avoiding rampant head lice. If your wig got bugs then you'd send it out to be boiled. The trend died with The French Revolution—which started with Marie and Louis XVI losing their heads.

But back to artists: How would you compare Vigée Le Brun's work with Van Dyck's?

KC Technical comparison between the two is almost unfair. If there ever was an Old Masters club, Van Dyck would have been one of the first admitted: His bravura technique was loose and assured, and he helped invent that painterly trick where a playful scramble of colorful brushstrokes up close suddenly resolves into almost photographic realism from a few steps away.

MKS They both had a knack for being lively and formal at once, and for implying real tenderness. Vigée Le Brun was more of a flatterer, but that's what she was hired for, and with her female subjects that meant a soft focus effect. She was applying Instagram filters, so to speak. .

KC She could create a fundamental connection across the centuries, and she did it so skillfully that it takes a few paintings to realize that the look she mastered is really a stock expression—dewy freshness for young women, confident worldliness in older men. This fits the facts of her biography. She married an older influential art dealer and when she fled Paris, he stayed behind and she traveled with her own young daughter. And somehow she still fit into high society in exile—I can't imagine how resourceful she had to be.

MKS Enormously resourceful, and very mindful of how she needed to present herself to clients to get work. There's a wonderful self-portrait by Vigée Le Brun (top, middle), used in the poster for the show. She was in her late teens when she painted it, but what made me laugh was seeing her in another self-portrait twenty years on and she hadn't aged a bit! I admit that as we walked through the Met show, I found myself getting a little bored by the all that posed, glistening perfection, in the same way that I get bored with over-produced selfies. I wanted some warts and all. I wanted Lucian Freud's unsparing 2001 portrait of Queen Elizabeth II! And, by the way, I give the Queen big props for agreeing to sit for that greatest of unflatterers.

KC Van Dyck does score higher in the humanity of expression, even though in the finished oil paintings he omitted the careworn and lively details that he faithfully captured in those amazing pencil drawings he made of sitters—the studies for the paintings, which are in the basement of the Frick.

MKS I'm sure both of their clients, like Donald Trump, had very specific ideas about what they wanted to look like—smaller nose, wider eyes, bigger cod piece. Van Dyck was, at one point, court painter to England's Charles I, who was just 5 feet tall, so there were some scale challenges for sure. I was amused by the trend at the British court, described as "elegant women wanting to pose with diminutive male companions." That was a trend! There's a great portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria with her "most famous" dwarf. Apparently he was first brought to the royal table in a pie and when he stepped out she adopted him at once. That's how you made it in those days.

KC My favorite painting in both shows was Van Dyck's portrait of Cardinal Bentivoglio (top, far left) that comes from the Pitti Palace. You can see how powerful a man he was, the second son of an aristocratic family, a secretary to the Pope, a diplomatic ambassador on Papal missions. He looks smart, sensitive, and so alive. I wouldn't have been that surprised if he'd started talking to me about his favorite show in the lineup at HBO.

MKSGame of Thrones, no doubt. The Cardinal's hands in that painting are divine—Van Dyck's hands are right up there with John Singer Sargent's. Sargent is my all time favorite society painter, and I think yours.

KC Most definitely. He was a modern though, because he could do two things at once: like Van Dyck and Vigée Le Brun he flattered the sitters—everyone is a total knockout in a Sargent painting—but somehow he still included details that allowed other people to judge his subjects harshly. That's quite a trick. His 1882 painting of the daughters of Edwin Darley Bolt, at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston—I'm sure the parents thought their little darlings looked divine, but it's also pretty clear to me that those four girls are perfect monsters.

MKS Here's another thing Vigée Le Brun and Van Dyck shared: Both were society insiders, courted by the rich, much like Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons or John Currin today. Van Dyck was chief assistant to Jean Paul Rubens by the age of 19. Based on that incredibly soulful 1627-28 self-portrait, painted when he was 14—let me repeat, 14!—he definitely would have made the T&C Bachelors' list. And when he moved to London to become court painter, he was something of a carouser, as well as a bit of a peacock. We can thank him for popularizing the Van Dyke beard.

KC And Vigée Le Brun would completely fit in as one of T&C's Modern Swans—well, maybe Rococo Swans.

MKS Certainly any modern socialite or celebrity can relate to, and admire, Vigée Le Brun's unfettered dedication to youthfulness and her painterly version of photo retouching. Much cheaper than plastic surgery, though I guess at a certain point you can't leave the house.

KC While we're on the subject of what the rich used to look like, I'm really looking forward to the Cindy Sherman show at Metro Pictures, which starts May 5. She's mostly doing grand dames these days, and her recreations are so vivid and to type that it takes a moment before you realize that these are women who have disappeared. They exist in this haunted gap between classic movies and archetype. I think the Cardinal would enjoy listening to their confessions.

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